S4 Ep12 - The Secret to Grading Early Years Reading

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Hi there, I'm Jocelyn and I'd like to welcome you to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast, recorded here on the lands of the Palawa people of Tasmania.

Here in Australia, it is Term 4 and the end of the school year is just a few weeks away. That means that teachers and leaders will be turning their attention to assessment and grading in preparation for report writing. So in this episode, I’d like to share some thoughts and suggestions on grading early years reading and hopefully help you have some clarity around what can feel like a messy subject.

The first thing to know is that, regardless of the approach to reading instruction your school uses, and regardless of the program, grading against the achievement standard of the Australian Curriculum, or your states' curriculum, is still the same as it has always been. We are not assessing against the scores from a benchmark assessment or even normed tools. We are assessing against the Achievement Standard from the Curriculum.

We also need to realise that there is likely not a direct correlation between where our students sit as shown by our instructional program assessment, so that's the assessment tool that comes with your phonics program, and the curriculum or syllabus. The connections between these measures and the Achievement Standards are somewhat arbitrary and alignment will need to be decided on after a thorough examination of the curriculum and your school's program. The point at which you might like your students to be up to in your phonics program is not necessarily close to what the curriculum is asking for.

In the old days, we would do our benchmark assessment, find the students’ level and use that to decide on a reading grade. The problem with this is that those levels actually aren’t aligned to any kind of evidence and that this system resulted in a wide variation in grading.

I very often ask the question of teachers in my professional learning sessions: What level are your students expected to be at by the end of grade one? And the answers were quite surprising in that there would be a six- or eight-level difference in what different schools were expecting.

So the C level for a Year 1 in one school was often quite different from what was required for a C in another school. And there just simply wasn’t consistency.

Step one in our grading journey for early reading is to know the curriculum expectations well.

Well, I often hear people saying we're coming to understand what Version 9 is expecting of us. Well, I can tell you it's pretty much what Version 8.4 was asking for. When the new curriculum came out, Version 9 of the Australian curriculum, I went through it content descriptor by content descriptor, comparing it to 8.4. And apart from some very important updates, the expectations of the what to be covered didn't change all that much. So Version 9 can feel very new to people if they have not had to explore the curriculum and use it actively in the past. But there weren't a huge number of changes in English, and that can be a blessing and it can be a curse, and that's above all of our paid grades. It just is what it is.

But it is critical that we know exactly what the achievement standard says for your grade for the end of the year. So often, we spend so much time trying to cover all of the content descriptors that we are then surprised when it comes time to report and we realise that we haven’t covered nearly enough of the things that really ‘count’ for grading or we've worried ourselves sick over things that don’t even appear in the standard for our grade.

One of the ways that we can get and stay on track in instruction, and the reason I'm talking about instruction is if you get this right the reporting and the grading is so much easier. One of the ways you can get and stay on track is to break down the achievement standard into ‘I can’ statements for each grade in terms of reading for the end of the year. If you are a Resource Room member, you already have access to this inside the Planning and Assessment section, for everyone from Foundation to Year 6.

But it can be a useful exercise for you to do with your team to help everybody really get their heads around what is happening inside that acheivement standard. 

Another thing that you can do is organise those statements that you're going to write according to whether they fall into the top or the bottom of Scarborough’s Reading Rope.

So for Foundation, I can statements for the top of the rope could be:

• I engage with stories that are read to me
• I can talk about characters, settings and events
• I can make connections between the story and my own experiences
• I can identify how the pictures and words in texts connect.

Now, the instruction around these elements is about your text based unit. It's not about the decodable text the children will read.

So, let's think about the bottom of the rope, and the I can statements could include things like:

• I know the letters of the alphabet and can say the most common sound of each letter
• I can read words with a CVC pattern like cat, dog and fox
• I can read some high-frequency words such as the, is, was, of, I, and a
• I can read short decodable texts and tell you about what happened.

Let’s be clear, this is the Australian Curriculum expectations for the end of the first year of school. It isn’t my expectation or the expectation for any program that I know of. I'd also like to add in the most common consonant digraphs and that students are reading words with 4 and 5 phonemes with ease.

This, for me, forms an at least point. You will have students in the Foundation year who can learn the code beyond this point, but we need to have an at least point that we're aiming for. That's our kind of minimum standard, if you like. And then there will be children who they're absolutely raring to go to learn more, and we will let them do that and help them to achieve what they can.

However, when we are reporting, the point isn’t that we are applying our own opinions or what our phonics program says, but rather assessing against the achievement standard. Each school will have its own way to wrestle with this conflict. And let’s be clear, there is going to be ambiguity and conflict of expectations between the curriculum and your school’s approach, so it’s probably wise to just accept that and do our best with it.

The Foundation standard is, at least, fairly clear in its expectations, with the exception of a length of text. What does a simple decodable text mean? We could ask 20 teachers and have 20 very different answers.

The General Capabilities has some additional details that can help shed light on the text-level reading part of the grading. It says that the student:

• Reads aloud a decodable or simple text at a reasonable pace, grouping words into meaningful phrases (that links to the understanding text or the basic comprehension bit. The understanding text is another section of those general capabilities.)
• Uses punctuation cues, and some intonation and expression
• Reads accurately at an efficient pace without overt sounding out and blending.

Now, this suggests a decodable text of at least several simple sentences. We can’t even turn to established norms such as the Hasbrouck Tindall Norms to help us out around text-level reading for Foundation. They don’t kick in until the middle of Year 1. I personally think that that's very sensible. But when we look at these norms, we can get some support and some general indications. We can see that the 50th percentile of reading rate or words correct per minute for the middle of Year 1 is 29. That would seem to me to indicate that we're really only looking for two or three short sentences by the end of Foundation. And I mean short.

Another indicator of text length comes from DIBELS. Now, the non-word reading fluency norms require just 7 words in a minute to be in the green zone, at benchmark. So those are nonsense words and the children are going to have to sound them out. And so they say seven is where it's at. The word reading subtest that contains high-frequency words that are a mix of fully and less decodable words requires 10 words in a minute.

Now putting all of this together, it is clear to me anyway that students do need to be reading words without sounding out but they don’t have to be reading long texts by the end of the year in Foundation.

In Year 1, we need students to have gained a considerable level of code knowledge and have made the move to word recognition for words containing multiple spellings of each phoneme, particularly the long vowels. Let’s reflect on Scarborough’s Reading Rope again through this Year 1 lens and connect that to the achievement standard. So, we're looking at I can statements that could be something like: 

• I can explain the different purposes of texts. 

Now I would make this a semester one focus actually, because the semester two focus then becomes:

• I can explain that texts are arranged in certain ways depending on their purpose.

So in semester one we're identifying and in semester two we are explaining, and that makes sense as a bit of a progression of learning.

Other I can statements are:

• I can make a connection between my own experience to explain characters and events in short texts.
• I can describe the characters, setting and events in different types of stories.

The General Capability again has more light to shed. In the understanding texts section, that's the comprehension bit, it states:

• Recounts or describes sequenced ideas or information
• Identifies a clearly evident main idea in a simple text
• Listens to texts to engage with learning area content (e.g. a text about family histories)
• Reads and views the content of texts and describes new or learnt information
• Expresses an opinion or preference for a topic or text with a supporting reason
• Draws obvious inferences by integrating print, visual and audio aspects of simple texts (e.g. uses images and key words to infer a character’s job). But wait, there's more...
• Identifies some differences between imaginative and informative texts

And I have to say that if you are a Resource Room member and you are teaching our text based units and you're teaching them in their entirety, then you are covering all of this because we use those content descriptors to design instruction. So all of this is covered. And when you're assessing for that top of the rope element, that's what you're looking at.

When considering the bottom of the rope for Year 1, we have to reflect now on student’s own reading, as we needed to for Foundation.

I can statements from the achievement standard could be:

• I can read aloud with fluency (but we need to know what fluency is, we need to define that for Year 1)
• I can read decodable texts that have both simple and compound sentences
• I use my knowledge of the code and morphology to read words with one- and two-syllables
• I use punctuation to help me understand the text (so capitals and full stops at this point)
• I can recall key ideas from the texts I read
• I can answer a variety of questions about the texts that I read.

And I'm not talking really inferential comprehension here, I'm talking about the who, what, when, where and the how, if that's been stated in the text.

When we get to Year 1, we have some specific indicators but still not guidance of the length of text, come on ACARA, help us out! But it doesn't, so we're going to do the best we can.

So we’ll turn back to our normed tools for guidance. The Hasbrouck Tindall Norms indicate that a student at the end of Year 1 should be reading at 60 words per minute to be at the 50th percentile. And that's what Jan Hasbrouck recommends, that we're aiming for the 50th percentile here at a minimum.

When we think about DIBELS, the norms indicate that between 39 and 75 correct words per minute put a student at benchmark, or in that green zone. So we can see that in terms of are we in the ballpark? And cross-referencing expectations, that seems to be pretty reasonable.

The good news in this is that, if your school is using DIBELS, Acadience or any other similar tool, you already have what you need to assess reading at the bottom of the rope. You absolutely don’t have to do another reading assessment.

Now I said at the star of this episode that there's not direct alignment between those tools and the curriculum. Because there's not. But when we know what we're looking for, we can look at our existing reading assessment to look for the indicators that the students have achieved the achievement standard. So they're not written to a line, but when we know what we're looking for we can draw the logical connections between them.

Now, there are lots of times when things don't make sense in education and what we're asked to do, but this kind of isn't one of them. So woohoo, how fantastic is that? Something is actually sensible and lines up. 

And then we have Year 2. By the end of Year 2, students should be reading a reasonably complex text at 90 words per minute. Of course, the curriculum doesn’t say that so let’s unpack it a little bit more, and look at more I can statements based in the achievement standard. 

Statements that relate to the top of the Rope can include:

• I can identify the literal and implied meaning in texts for which I have the background knowledge and vocabulary to do so

I've added that bit it about the background knowledge and vocabulary because we know that those elements are so important for comprehension. So this tells us that we are likely to be able to assess this particular point based in the work we've done from our text based unit rather than an unseen text that we may not have built vocabulary for and we don't know the background knowledge for it.

• I can discuss how ideas are presented through characters and events (well, we're back to our text based unit)
• I can describe how similar topics are presented in different types of texts (text based unit)
• I can identify the language features and visual elements used in texts (text based unit).

So once again we can see that these parts of the achievement standard relate directly to the text based unit. And I have to tell you, when I was designing the structure of our text based units, I did so by examining the curriculum, identifying what out of the curriculum would be addressed through a standard phonics instruction approach. So systematic synthetic phonics with decodable text and some sentence level work and all of that, and then everything else went into the text based unit. So between those two things, you've got it covered.

Now the statements relating to the bottom of the rope for Year 2, again relate to students own reading and could be:

• I read books with simple, and compound sentence structures
• I can read with the ‘full’ alphabetic code including less common patterns
• I can read words in books that I don’t know well

That is about set for variability and using our code knowledge and word knowledge to sound out and tidy up pronunciation of words that I'm unfamiliar with on the page. The next point:

• I use the pictures and images that help me understanding more about what I am reading (Note, I didn't say I use the pictures to lift the words from the page, but I can use those pictures and images to deepen my understanding of what I've just accurately decoded)
• I can recognise when what I have read doesn’t make sense (and so that is comprehension monitoring that we know is so important) and can fix up sounding out words I've read that don't sound right using my code knowledge and knowledge of punctuation
• I can read multisyllable words
• I can answer simple questions about the texts I read
• I can use punctuation such as full stops and commas to read fluently.

So now we're getting into phrasing. So in Year 2, that expectation of what's going on at the bottom of the rope in that lifting words from the page and the nuts and bolts of reading. They are increasing as students knowledge increases

And, yet again, the curriculum and general capabilities are silent on topic of text length. Now, at the end of the general capabilities document there is a section describing the features of the simple text that students are expected to be reading, but it doesn't say anything about length. So let's go back to the norms. 

The Hasbrouck Tindall Norms say 100 words correct per minute by the end of Year 2. DIBELS states that a minimum of 96 words per minute is required for on-track reading. 

And the complexity of passage? Well, have a listen, this is a text from DIBELS, it is the Year 2 text, and of course, you can just find DIBELS on the internet, but I've referenced this so you can follow the link.

So this here in an end of Year 2 text, it's titled Puppy Love...

So clearly, this is a non-fiction text and students need to be able to read that non-fiction text in order to reach that expected outcome for the end of year two and I think that's very reasonable. So we've explored the curriculum and I strongly recommend that you do this exercise with your team to develop a shared understanding and common vision for what is expected to be where students need to be by the end of Foundation Year 1, Year 2 when it comes to reading. So I've referenced the Australian Curriculum here, but you may have a different one for your state. So this can be a really good exercise to bring everyone together and help you have consistency across classroom.

The next step in getting this grading business under control for the end of the year is considering other aspects, such as the circumstances the student can perform the skill in and how much support they need to do so. Each state and system will have their own take on this, and you need to follow that, but I'm just sharing a suggestion with you now in case you're looking for some clarity around this point.

So here's a suggestion that resource room members find in those I Can statements that are in the planning and assessment section.

C: So, for example, using the phonics patterns in the teacher-led classroom tasks.

D: So in this instance we're not talking about that the students had different content, it was about how much support they needed to complete the task.

So when you're planning, if you're doing that really rigorously, you will have made plans for children who you know need this sort of support. Doesn't mean they're not going to learn the same content as everyone else. It's just that the support is differentiated and that will affect the grading when we get up to an A.

We used to think that an A grade meant you were two years ahead of your peers, but that's not actually accurate.

A: So there we're, looking at how precise the student is, how accurate, how well they can transfer the thing you've taught into unknown contexts. It doesn't mean that you had to have taught them the Year 2 content if they're a Foundation student for them to get an A, and whether we're assigning A to E grades to foundation or that differs across the country.

But the point is here that there's more to it than just the scores that we see in our assessment tool. So let me just give you a little bit more context around this in terms of bringing this back to the reading.

So if a student could sound out words in the context of your phonics lesson, but was unable to do it independently in their own reading, for code that they have, the grade would have to be a D. However, if they could take what you had taught and applied the knowledge to read unfamiliar words in their own independent reading outside the instructional contexts, the grade might be a B. If they then took what you taught about morphology and etymology, and look, let's face it, in the early years that will be present and it needs to be present, but it's not going to be the way it is in upper primary and they use that to read complex scientific texts, well, the grade might be an A. 

Grading is a confluence of a number of ‘moving parts’ and developing confidence in grading against achievement standards can take some time. As you approach the end of the year, try not to look for the one tool that will tell you everything about early years reading. It doesn’t exist, we might say well, it used to, but I'm so sorry the reality is it didn't. We just thought that it did because we didn't understand how all the moving parts worked. 

So instead of looking for that unicorn tool, plan to grade using a combination of evidence from the student’s own reading and the work that you do through your text based units. 

This reporting cycle might differ from previous ones for your school, but you have the time, and I know you have the smarts, you do, you've got this, to shift your processes in time for the upcoming reporting. Working with your team on this will help them gain clarity and whether you are a school leader or you're a teacher in a classroom thinking how can I work with my colleagues, this is for you. So best of luck everybody. It's going to be okay. You're not going to break the children. Just don't break yourself.

Until next time. Bye.

References:

Hasbrouck, J. & Tindal, G. (2017). Fluency Norms Chart. https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/fluency/articles/fluency-norms-chart-2017-update

Australian Curriculum: English F-2. https://v9.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/learning-areas/english/foundation-year_year-2_year-1?view=quick&detailed-content-descriptions=0&hide-ccp=0&hide-gc=0&side-by-side=1&strands-start-index=0

DIBELS. https://dibels.uoregon.edu/

Looking for a way to help your team build a shared understanding of the milestones of early years reading?  Regardless of the phonics program or assessment tools you use, 'From Phonics to Uncontrolled Text' will provide clarity.  Download this FREE guide below.